Quintessential Doyle

You think of Arthur Conan Doyle, and the name that
immediately comes to mind is that of the iconic Baker Street detective Sherlock
Holmes. For lovers of crime fiction and Holmes, Baker Street is on the bucket
list during any trip to London. Even today, Sherlock remains the most popular
and iconic detective of all times, comparable perhaps only to Poirot, with a
canon that has enthralled generation after generation of crime fiction lovers.
However, like Christie who apart from Poirot, Miss Marple or
even Tommy and Tuppence also wrote a number of stories not involving any of
them, this collection of Doyle is interesting for not using Holmes as the
detective. Sixteen out of Doyle’s total number of 56 short stories are included
in the collection, and many of which are significant as Doyle, who was
qualified as a doctor makes use of his medical knowledge in a number of them.
The second aspect that one notices is the dominance of reason over emotion in
many of the stories. Whether it is the opening story ‘The Physiologist’s Wife’
or ‘The Sealed Room’, Doyle’s own vision as a rationalist are evident. Also,
everything in the stories is constructed in such a manner so as to be
believable, and explicable at the level of reality—as Jerry Pinto writes in his
Introduction to the collection, ‘particularly that which seemed to first belong
to the realm of the supernatural, the hellish, the horrible: the blanched face
at the window in the middle of the night, the dead man in a closed room…, the
curious incident of the dog at night time’ (Introduction, p. vii).
In keeping with the time period during which they were written,
the stories also depict a changing world—a world where industrialization,
urbanization, discoveries and inventions, science and technology are beginning
to gain credibility—while at the same time, the relationship with the
non-scientific, the non-rational superstitious, supernatural and spiritual
continue, thereby occupying a liminal space between the two worlds. The stories
in the collection are therefore rational yet supernatural, horrific yet contain
the element of the neo-Gothic that dominated late Victorian and early 20th
century thought processes. ‘The Mind of the Man’ also dominates the thread of
the collection. Therefore, in the opening story we see the protagonist
literally dying of a broken heart, the title story of ‘The Case of Lady Sannox’
sees the ...